The Attic (a name which commemorates our first physical location) is, first and foremost, a site for the research students of the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester: a virtual community which aims to include all students, be they campus-based and full-time, or distance-learning and overseas. But we welcome contributions from students of museum studies - and allied subject areas - from outside the School and from around the world. Here you will find a lot of serious stuff, like exhibition and research seminar reviews, conference alerts and calls for papers, but there's also some 'fluff'; the things that inspire, distract and keep us going. After all, while we may be dead serious academic types, we're human too.

Monday, November 24, 2014

School of Museum Studies Research Seminar Wednesday 22nd October 2014, Professor Simon Gunn The Strange Death of Industrial England

On
Wednesday 22nd October 2014 Professor Simon Gunn, Professor of Urban
History at the Centre for Urban History, a research centre within the University
of Leicester’s School of History, and author of books including:History
and cultural theory (2006) and The
public culture of the Victorian middle class: ritual and authority and the English
industrial city, 1840-1914 (2000), visited the University of Leicester
School of Museum Studies Research Seminar Series to speak on the topic of ‘The
Strange Death of Industrial England’.

Simon
Gunn began the seminar by outlining his aim to explore the place of de-industrialisation
in the history of late twentieth century Britain.Simon argued that the process of industrial
decline has suffered from limited visibility in the history or historiography
of later twentieth century Britain.Simon wished to address how we might change this situation, and how we
might go about studying industrial decline and how that itself might change the
ways we think about the England and the Britain of the contemporary period.

Simon
discussed the changes seen in Britain between the 1960s and 1980s, within a
generation, with this industrial nation, in which manufacturing and coalmining
were to seen to form a vital part of the economy, moving towards being a
post-industrial nation, economically dominated by the service sector, with
manufacturing and mining now a minor or marginal element.Simon suggested that if it is possible to
conceive of the death of industrial England it occurred within these
years.

Simon
explained his decision to title the seminar ‘The Strange Death of Industrial
England’, referencing George Dangerfield’s book exploring the decline in the
influence of the British Liberal Party in the years before the First World War,
suggesting that the death of industrial England might be seen as strange for
two reasons; firstly, Simon highlighted the speed with which the process of
de-industrialisation took place and secondly, Simon emphasised how the process
of industrial collapse is so little remarked upon in the historical writing of
the period.

Drawing
upon statistics relating to UK cotton and coal output and exports, and car
industry figures, Simon highlighted the decline in output and exports in these
industries over the course of the twentieth century.Simon discussed how some five million jobs
were lost in manufacturing between the 1960s and the 1990s.Simon posited that, while elements of
manufacturing might have survived, and even revived, from the 1990s, the
world’s first industrial nation could no longer pretend to be an industrial
country by the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Regarding
the debates which have occurred centring upon the causes of industrial decline,
Simon briefly mentioned some of the factors cited, from lack of investment in
industrial infrastructure and technology, to the failings of liberal education
and the lack of an enterprise culture.Simon highlighted how debate was particular fraught and politicised in
the 1980s among critics and historians such as Patrick Wright and Robert
Hewison, whilst noting that fears about decline have been a repeated feature of
elite thinking in Britain from at least the 1880s.However, whilst noting how the 1964 general
election was the first in which modernisation of the economy and society became
a major theme, Simon argued that no government of left or right, nor business
or trade union, envisaged the near total collapse of Britain’s industrial
structure in the two decades after 1970.Simon queried why such an understanding of the changes to come might
have been so slow to develop, drawing upon appropriate geography, a term developed
by David Matless, related to the work of planners such as Patrick Abercrombie, as
perhaps forming a part of any such explanation.Simon suggested that the logic of appropriate geography helped to
reinforce a particular idea of the manufacturing north as a fact of nature, a
permanent fixture in the nation and the national identity.

Simon
argued that the industrial urban way of life described by JB Priestley in his
1934 work English Journey, wasn’t
necessarily recognised as being in terminal decline until the 1980s.Simon suggested that fragments of this
landscape and culture may have survived de-industrialisation, however,
referencing Robert Colls’ work, he argued that commentators seem agreed that
the collective way of life based upon this industrial urban society did not
survive.Simon argued that it can be all
too easy for nostalgia about the passing of this industrial world to set in, in
particular as this world can be presented as the obverse of the uncertain
individualist present.Simon emphasised
how the term de-industrialisation itself looks backward rather than forward
without addressing what might replace the industry.Simon reiterated his view that
de-industrialisation is a subject that we need to understand historically.

Simon
acknowledged that one of the reasons behind the difficulty in developing this
historical understanding of the de-industrialisation process is not only the
nostalgia this process invokes, but also the political heat still evoked in
relation to this issue.Simon suggested
that what has been left out of politicised debates around the process of
de-industrialisation are the ways in which de-industrialisation was registered
socially and culturally across Britain within and beyond the communities
concerned as well as a consideration of the deeper processes of historical
change that de-industrialisation brought in its wake.Simon also emphasised the need to think about
the way in which de-industrialisation often intersected with other major shifts
occurring in the period, such as in relation to the decades of migration and settlement
occurring during this period and in relation to shifts in thought, such as in
relation to the origins of neoliberal thought and practices from the 1960s.

Simon
proposed that it is in opening up the 1970s and 1980s to historical view that
we see a complex of processes, often wrongly seen as separate from one another,
to be deeply interwoven with one another, constituting a rupture with the
past.Simon argued the need to understand
this rupture due to the ongoing effects in the contemporary period.

This was
a fascinating seminar providing much food for thought for those taking part
from a variety of disciplines.

***STOP PRESS***

PhD Conferences

We have a new PhD conference upcoming this year November 5-6th 2013. It is called Museum Metamorphosis and is all about the adaptable and changing museums of today. We are sponsored by AHRC and in partnership with Leicester Museums. The official website and details can be found here.

Last year's PhD student conference was held March 27-28 2012, and was titled Museum Utopias; it was supported by the University of Leicester and Hanwell. It was an intreguing two days of utopic ideals and realities in museums today. Details are available on the official website. Read the blog for a session-by-session review of the conference.

The 2011 conference was held in Leicester March 28-30, and was called Curiouser & Curiouser; supported financially by the University of Leicester, it was an exciting three days of the weird and wonderful in heritage studies. Read the blog to find out more. We also held a highly successful PhD student symposium in December 2009. Read the blog.